The state of the Industry and Capitalism

[Tober]

Gaming industry is just moving up and down and sideways all the time. With time it self corrects. Let's see some trends currently:

Start up studio's with the only purpose of being bought by a big player for big money, so the founders can retire after 1 (half) finished game: Looks to go the way of the dodo. These are the typical I'm going to start a new AAA studio people. Why a AAA as your first real game? Because looking for a buyer. Not a sure bet in this economy.

Experienced talented Indy studio's are getting more interesting and important. Sure some will fail. But also many will be successful not hampered by the weight of corporate expectations. See as examples Super Giant Games, Larian studio's or Sabotage. These kind of studio's do not want a corporate overlord, make games born out of passion projects and will increase their foot print.

Online games (incl. Cloud) require infrastructure to support those games. Infrastructure cost money to build up, run and maintain. Those are recurring cost. Therefore the industry is looking for recurring revenue. Hence GAAS, subscriptions and the like. That is not going away, because you cannot support a one-and-done online game's recurring costs, without some sort of recurring revenue into eternity.

XBox specifically. I think this will in the end go as well as the Windows Phone after buying Nokia. There is to much corporate pressure for creatives to do their thing. To much excel management. Microsoft has this vision of revolutionizing the games industry and be the prime beneficiary of it. But when the basics of delivering a steady flow of good games isn't met, then every vision can be thrown in the trash can.